I'm still lost. We write things down and link to them and cite them all the time; I don't see why you think that's bad in this case. It does add the implication that the cited norm is generally agreed on, but if we've talked the norms over and only listed ones where that's the case that doesn't seem likely to be a problem - and, even in that case, citing a listed norm only seems to me to carry about equivalent conversational weight to someone posting "[behavior] is normal here; you should have expected it" and getting upvoted in agreement a couple of times. Plus, it gives new people an opportunity to learn those norms more quickly, and also allows us to explicitly not count certain things as norms even if they're common habits, if they're things we want to allow anyway.

There is some context that might be notable, here: Alicorn and I happen to have been working on a house norms list for the last several days, since we decided to offer CronoDAS the opportunity to come stay with us for a while. That's been going quite well, and appears to have several advantages over a house rule list - the flexibility mentioned above is one, and the fact that norms can semi-contradict each other in ways that rules mostly can't is another, for example. So I have some positive affect built up around the concept, where I suspect that you have some negative affect around it because of how the concept came up here.